I'm overclocking my card, trying to push it to the limits, and was wondering what a safe (maximum) temperature for my card is?

60 is pretty safe, i think you can get up to 80 celsius, but 60 is a pretty good temp for not stressing the components

so is 80 ok for under intense stress (playing crysis)?

SpeedFan 4.36 beta 10 was just released. If you have an nVidia graphics card, you could try using that to see whether the overclocking is too much.

It depends on how well-designed the card is, but 60 is generally the safe zone.

The Ati 4850/70 is designed to work at 80 degrees C. It really depends on the card. You probably shouldn't push it too much hotter than stock, just raise the fan speeds to compensate.

mm a question, what do you mean by safe??? you mean it doesnt burn, or that the components are not suffering for high temps... because a video card can run at 80C but the life of the components is going to suffer, if you can keep it under 70C under full its ok, if you can keep it under full load at 60C is better (i think this is the sweet spot) temp but 80C i think is just a bit too much, buy a new fan, a zalman one or a thermaltake the one that is dual fanned

haha i know someone is going to call me a retard, but here we go

I got a dell inspirion e1705 a little over a year ago for 1500 or so dollars.

It's a laptop.

It's got 2.0 ghz core2duo

2 gb of RAM

and a go7900GS

It's been pretty good to me, but there were some games it couldn't run well enough, and I'd actually wanted to play them

Bioshock for example would give me like 20-30 fps with everything on low (except i kept high detail shaders on) at 1024x768 resolution.

So I just flashed my bios, and unlocked my videocard, and now I overclocked it from 375mhz core 500mhz memory to 580 core 730 memory.  I'm not getting any artifacts, and everything's running fine.  My FPS have skyrocketed in Bioshock.  I have everything on high, i think i had my resolution at 1600x1200 and I'm getting 30-60+ fps at all times.  I'm getting great performance in other games too (Call of Duty 4, Supreme Commander...  Crysis hasn't seemed to budge tho... it must be dominating my video card AND my CPU)

The problem is my card can get up to 80 degrees, I think it actually got up to 84 at one point...

Well I have 2 programs, one is Dell Inspirion Fan Control v 3.1

and then I'm using ATI tool. ATI tool always has like, an 8 degree higher reading than my other program, and I don't know which one to trust. (ATITool is the one giving me the 80+ temp readings)

but anyways.  Someone can call me a retard for overclocking a laptop videocard, but my performance is incredible!

Is this incredibly unsafe to run at these temps?  Again, I'm not getting any artifacts, my systems running stable.  Is there any other cooling method I can use for my laptop?

WOW, My laptop for gaming is the exact same, and I got it about the same time last year. Although it seems I've been running bioshock a little better. I really wanna know what people tell you about this dilemma since I really wanna be able to bring all the new games around with me on campus and not chained to the room.

I've got a 7900GS in my desktop and i'm warning you that they don't like temps consistently over 70. Playing the Crysis demo over a couple of days cooked mine. I've now got to keep the card below 65 to prevent getting artifacts and 3D games are just no longer an option.